lt;/pre> <p>Such a world of "conflict and action" reduces men to "drunkards" who live on "animal sensation alone," avoiding "the dull flat look of things"; it produces not only individuals such as Bigger Thomas, Richard Loeb, and Nathan Leopold but also the cataclysmic disruptions of "Nazi Germany and old Russia" (446).

Glicksberg "is speaking hyperbolically" when he claims that "Richard Wright is Bigger Thomas--one part of him anyway," but adds "Nevertheless, there is some truth in the assertion, and not merely in the general sense, according to the formulation of James Baldwin, that 'no American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the skull.

For that matter, the mystery of the Daltons is not solved when the skeleton in th eir basement is revealed, leading eventually to Bigger Thomas, because it is clear that they will never understand the secret behind the veil of the black belt where people live in houses the Daltons own.

In this setting, Bigger Thomas represents the would-be artist whose arrested development demonstrates the collaborating social impact of personal privacy, self-obliteration, and the creation of fictional narratives or fields, a trio of experiences the reader-as-author simulates via his or her configuration of Bigger as a fictional character.

When I read Richard Wright's Native Son, I was fascinated by that incident when Bigger Thomas suffocated Mary Dalton to death, brutally severed her head with a hatchet and threw her body into a blazing furnace.

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